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On 18 August 1868, during a total solar eclipse in India, Pierre Janssen saw an unknown line in the sun's spectrum. An element that had never been found on earth had been discovered in the sky.
Frederick II of Prussia died at Sanssouci on 17 August 1786. Kant's essay 'What Is Enlightenment?' was written under his rule and named him directly, and the eighteenth century's most contested political concept took shape around him.
On 16 August 1858 Queen Victoria sent a message to President Buchanan along a cable laid beneath the ocean. It took seventeen hours to arrive — but for the first time communication had come loose from transport.
Ibn Hazm, the sharpest pen of al-Andalus, died near Seville on 15 August 1064. He was the author both of a book about love and of a severe defence of logic.
Bertolt Brecht, the founder of epic theatre, died on 14 August 1956. His 'alienation effect' opened an argument, still unsettled, about whether art can make an audience think.
The Scottish inventor John Logie Baird, the first man to make television work, was born on 13 August 1888. Once it became possible to see at a distance, the argument about perception and reality changed too.
Jeremy Taylor, whose writings on conscience shaped English moral thought, died on 13 August 1667. His defence of toleration was written in the years of the civil war.
The IBM PC went on sale on 12 August 1981. The passage of computing power from institutions to individuals also altered arguments running from the philosophy of mind to the theory of knowledge.
Alessandro Achillini, the Bologna master whose contemporaries called him a second Aristotle, died on 12 August 1512. In the Renaissance, philosophy and medicine still met in the same chair.
